


not dead yet

by scesisonomaton



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Gen, I cannot write humorous fic for the life of me so, Nightingale refuses medical attention, Post-Book: Lies Sleeping, Sickfic, general background angst/sense of dread, sorry about that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-13
Updated: 2019-01-13
Packaged: 2019-10-09 10:27:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17405219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scesisonomaton/pseuds/scesisonomaton
Summary: ‘It’s nothing,’ he said, which was a blatant lie if ever I’d heard one. ‘In a minute -’‘With all due respect, sir,’ I said, ‘no chance in hell.’Nightingale is sick and refuses to admit it.





	not dead yet

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by a post by @dhiatzs on tumblr about Nightingale absolutely refusing to admit that he's sick and maybe, possibly, needs some rest.

All through my suspension, Nightingale insisted on my usual afternoon practice, and at least once a week  he made the trip over the river to supervise me running my drills at the far end of Bev’s back garden. I’d painstakingly calculated the exact distance I needed to be from the house to avoid frying Bev’s shiny new dishwasher (which she was very protective about), and even so there were a couple of higher order spells I didn’t dare try outside of the Folly. This annoyed Nightingale to no end, because those were exactly what I really needed to be working on to build solid foundations that the next level of spells could stand on. But he doesn’t fancy facing Bev’s wrath any more than I do, especially not while practically ankle deep in her river.

On this reasonably fine Thursday, he was leaning against the rickety garden table with his arms crossed, watching me conjure a series of _lux_ variations. I can do most of these in my sleep, so I had plenty of time to watch him in turn. He was all buttoned up today, despite the warmth, and he was frowning at me like I’d kicked his dog or, worse, spurned Molly’s teacakes.

As far as I could tell, the inquiry into my actions re: Martin Chorley’s death were going about as well as could be hoped. I hadn’t been summoned to give statements in at least a week, and Nightingale and I had met up for Ethiopian after the last time, so it couldn’t be anything I’d done in that regard, and I hadn’t botched a single _forma_ yet. Whatever had caused his mood today, it hadn’t been me, but unfortunately there were currently at least three dozen reasons he wasn’t allowed to tell me about, so that was a small comfort.

I caught him coughing when I transitioned into my _impello_ routine. He turned away from the river and discreetly raised his handkerchief when he thought I wasn’t looking, but I noticed anyway, because I’m easily distracted and letting my gaze wander while levitating a small boulder is exactly the sort of thing I would do.

Nightingale has this horrible habit, which infuriates Dr Walid to no end, to keep a stiff upper lip and carry on even if you were shot in the chest less than a month ago. Our very own world-renowned gastroenterologist likes to remind him that despite all indications to the contrary, he’s not as young as he used to be, and Nightingale will respond that he isn’t dead yet, and from that point onward it’s advised that all civilian bystanders vacate the premises immediately, stay indoors, and keep their windows shut. They haven’t actually gone nuclear yet, but Dr Walid will not hesitate to bring out Dr Vaughan’s prized brain collection and that’s never a pleasant experience for anyone but medical professionals.

I wouldn’t have mentioned it, though. Mostly because a bit of a summer cold isn’t anything to write home about even if you are a hundred-and-ten-ish functioning immortal, but also because I’m not a bloody snitch. There are some things that you just don’t bring up when your boss is also your teacher and occasional housemate because you like being able to eat your breakfast in peace and not spend your Saturday afternoons being followed around by smug rainclouds.

So I would have been perfectly content to keep my mouth shut, except ten minutes later I mixed up two _adjectivia_ and caused the handful of pebbles I was using to practice to drop to the ground like, well, stones, and Nightingale shook his head and coughed a bit more.

 ‘Have the second phrase lined up before you release the first,’ he told me, not for the first time, and pushed away from the table to come join me in my Circle for the Safe Practice of the Forms and Wisdoms Without Blowing the Electrical Grid. He cleared his throat in that way people do when they’ve already coughed twice during a meeting and feel slightly ashamed about it. ‘You need to commit to the spell and have everything ready to go immediately.’ He gestured at me and I gathered up my collection of pebbles for him.

The first phase of this spell is a really basic _impello_ , the same variation you use when you’re first learning to float apples around. Except at this point I’m expected to not explode them anymore so I get to use pebbles instead. The second part is a _different_ variation that has pretty much the same effect but uses different modifiers because the old masters liked to make things complicated to, as far as I can tell, show off and annoy their apprentices. I can do both of these separately without thinking about it, but the point of the spell isn’t really the _forma_ itself. It’s supposed to hone your reflexes and train your reaction time because for a fraction of a second, you have to let the pebbles go. That fraction of a second was the source of all my trouble because, try as I might, once I’d dropped them I couldn’t manage to grab hold of the bloody things again before they hit the ground.

Nightingale cleared his throat again, and I still wasn’t fooled. ‘We really should work on improving your reaction time,’ he said. ‘This would be much easier for you to practice with that device of yours.’

I’d actually considered carting some equipment over from the Folly, but even apart from the nightmare of red tape I’d have to navigate because the Folly qualifies as an official police station and anything contained within therefore counts as police equipment, I didn’t think keeping a doctored automated firing rig in the shed would be a good idea. Even if all it deployed was paintballs. I was getting the impression that Nightingale hadn’t really anticipated just how much my suspension would affect my apprenticeship, either. If I didn’t know better than even thinking such words about my boss, I’d say he was getting antsy about it.

 ‘We shall have to make do with what we have, then.’ He arranged the pebbles in the palm of his hand and stacked his shoulders in that way he does when he’s preparing for a spell.

I closed my eyes to focus on the feel of the _formae_ building as he cast the spell, which is still what works best for me (Abigail does it too but she’s recently started holding her breath as well, a habit Nightingale disapproves of). It’s always a pleasure to watch him cast - decades of practice and that soldier’s discipline he has about everything magical give his _signare_ that satisfying clockwork sensation, everything clicking into place, that strikes terror into the hearts of magical wrongdoers everywhere.

Except even with my eyes closed I felt the cogs stutter and stop and the whole mechanism grind to an uncomfortable, gritty halt as the pebbles dropped in the grass with a faint thud. Nightingale shook with the effort of trying to suppress another coughing fit and still had the nerve to wave me off when I attempted to move towards him.

‘It’s nothing,’ he said, which was a blatant lie if ever I’d heard one. ‘In a minute -’

 ‘With all due respect, sir,’ I said, ‘no chance in hell.’

He scowled at me for all of two seconds before he almost bent double with another round of coughing.

 ‘Have you been to the doctor’s?’ I asked, knowing he hadn’t.

 ‘Abdul is busy.’

 ‘And you’re coughing your lungs out on Bev’s lawn.’ I gathered up the pebbles and dropped them on the table so they wouldn’t wreak havoc on the lawn mower. ‘I think we’ve got some lemsip somewhere.’

We didn’t, but as soon as I got Nightingale to sit down he sort of sagged into the sofa and went a bit pale, by white-people-standards, so I didn’t think lemsip was going to cut it anyway. I got him a glass of water and a couple of cough drops because that was all I had on hand but some serious intervention was obviously required. He was still wearing his suit jacket as well as a waistcoat and shirt, but his hands were shaking when he took the glass and he looked only marginally better than a limp dishrag.

‘It’s a cold, Peter. I’ve had far worse.’ He had enough energy to roll his eyes at me, so he wasn’t going to die in the next two hours, which I found rather reassuring because you wouldn’t have thought so from looking at him.

I wondered how he’d escaped Molly’s watchful eye. Even with Foxglove and all the analysts still working out of the Folly, she usually found plenty of time to hover menacingly over Nightingale’s shoulder if she thought he wasn’t getting enough sleep.

Apparently he knew what I was thinking, because he said: ‘It has been a busy week’ and inspected the coffee table in a manner I would have call sheepish if it were anybody else.

The problem was, I got it. I thought it was stupid, but I could totally see where he was coming from. With me relegated firmly to the shelf for the foreseeable future, Nightingale was the only real Falcon-capable officer the Met had to offer right now. Abigail could handle low-level stuff on her own but anything much more complicated than ghost sightings and the occasional fae mischief really needed to be dealt with by someone with more authority and training than my teenage cousin - I didn’t even want to think about what would happen if she ever came face-to-face with a demon trap. And whatever Guleed was getting up to on the rooftops of Soho, you just don’t learn magic in less than six months.

So it made _sense_ that Nightingale didn’t want to take time off just because he was, as he’d probably call it, a bit under the weather. On the other hand, he looked like death warmed over, and was currently pretending that he wasn’t in serious danger of coughing his head off.

 ‘I hope you’re not expecting me to ignore this, sir,’ I said, taking full advantage of the fact that he was too preoccupied to be sarcastic at me. ‘It’s not just a case of the sniffles if you can’t reliably cast.’

 ‘It was one spell,’ he protested, taking another sip of water.

I blinked at him. ‘And you reckon whoever you’re trying to arrest is just going to wait for you to stop wheezing?’ _Lesley wouldn’t,_ a small voice in the back of my head said. It had started whispering this sort of thing just after I’d been suspended, and it was getting harder to ignore.

‘I would greatly appreciate if you would drop the subject,’ Nightingale said imperiously, glaring at me. He’d drunk most of the water, but the cough drops lay untouched on our single coaster which we only brought out when he came over.

‘Not a chance, boss.’ I folded my arms and tried to look as menacing as I could, which probably wasn’t much. Waving my last shreds of self-preservation instinct goodbye, I switched on my phone. ‘I’m calling Dr Walid.’

There was a GP’s office just a couple of streets away, definitely much closer than UCH, but we’d learned one awkward afternoon that exposing our medical files for your garden-variety physician was not a great idea unless we were willing to explain not only the WWII gunshots but also more MRIs per head than possibly the entirety of Charing Cross nick put together. I’d even started getting my flu shots from Dr Walid.

 ‘Unless you’d rather I call Molly,’ I added, and was gratified to see him flinch. For a person who didn’t talk, Molly could certainly make her opinions very clear. Personally, I would take a Patented Walid Lecture™ over Molly’s glaring any day of the week but there’s no accounting for taste.

Nightingale sighed. ‘I suppose this is not the time to remind you that you are my apprentice and supposed to do as I say?’

 ‘You can try,’ I said, ’but I wouldn’t take any bets on your chances.’

 ‘Very well,’ he said, leaning back so his head rested on the back of the sofa. ’If you insist.’

I did insist. Normally, I never would have dared to talk to my boss like this unless I had at least a moderate death wish but Nightingale was so obviously out of it and besides, he was Nightingale.

I went to put the kettle on because, as a rule of thumb, a cup of tea is good for your health, and when I came back to the living room my boss was asleep on the sofa, out like a fucking light. It wasn’t pretty - his mouth was open and he was breathing with a rattling sound like a marble in a washing machine, but he seemed comfortable enough.

I knew that Abigail was currently at the hospital to what we were calling the Folly Special - a pretty comprehensive physical plus bloodwork and MRI to keep an eye out for aneurysms and what Dr Vaughan pointedly did not refer to as cauliflower brain - so it wouldn’t be too difficult to get a hold of Dr Walid. The good doctors, especially him, had insisted on implementing measures to monitor changes to our health, but I figured it was just an excuse to expand their collections of brain scans and blood samples. Seriously, just when you think that at least while you’re suspended you’ll have to spend less time in hospital, they come up with new ways to get you in there.

Bev’s keys rattled in the front door. I heard the distinctive thump of her uni bag being dropped by the coatrack and a pair of sneakers right beside it, and then Bev walked into the living room with her hair pulled up into a knot and a box of pastries from that bakery she liked. It took her a moment to take in the scene, then she gestured at the kitchen, eyebrow raised, and shut the door behind us.

 ‘Hey babes,’ she said casually, ‘why is there a wizard asleep on the sofa?’

 ‘I’m a wizard, and I fall asleep on the sofa all the time,’ I pointed out. ‘So’s Abigail.’

 ‘Come on, you know that’s different. He’s _the Nightingale_. I didn’t think he _could_ sleep.’

 ‘He’s sick,’ I said.

Beverley put the pastries down with infinitely more care than she had taken with her bag and went to peer into the living room, where my boss was still knocked out, faintly snoring. ‘He looks like shit,’ she said, almost a bit in awe. ‘This is weird. It is so weird.’

To be entirely fair, Nightingale had been coming around pretty regularly to ‘keep me on my toes’, as he liked to say, so we had almost gotten used to having him in the house. Bev had been a bit reluctant about it but he’d brought over several rather nice bottles of wine and been unfailingly polite and, on one memorable occasion, helped Maksim and me dig up some old pipes down in Richmond, which had significantly improved Bev’s opinion of him.

I watched as Nightingale’s head drooped a little to one side. ‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘It’s weird.’

 ‘How sick is he that he’s just falling asleep like that?’ Bev asked. We were keeping our voices down so we wouldn’t disturb him and it made the whole thing feel even more surreal than it was anyway.

That had been worrying me as well. ‘He botched a spell.’

As much as she keeps telling me wizard magic is completely different from the stuff she does, Bev has spent enough time around Newtonian practitioners to know our deal. She gave a low whistle. ‘Damn, okay. That’s bad. You sure he shouldn’t be in hospital or something?’

I waved my phone at her. ‘Working on it.’

Dr Walid picked up at the first ring, which he always did when I called these days. ‘Peter,’ he said, and I heard the whirr of the MRI muffled in the background. ‘How are you?’

Now, I didn’t actually suspect that Valerie was sharing details of our sessions with Dr Walid, because patient confidentiality and all that, but sometimes he used that suspiciously casual tone of voice and I got a little bit paranoid about it. I explained the situation, briefly considering to withhold the botched spell because once again, I am no snitch and the lecture was already going to be enough of a punishment without adding fuel to the fire. But it has been drilled into me that you’re supposed to tell your doctors everything to, and I quote ‘not make our job more difficult than it already is’, so I didn’t.

Dr Walid’s voice sounded remarkably calm, but I guess they make you practice that sort of thing in med school. ‘Does he feel feverish at all?’

In the living room, Nightingale took a rasping breath but didn’t wake up.

 ‘He’s asleep,’ I said. ‘He crashed on the sofa.’

The background noise at the other end of the line died down as either the MRI shut off or Dr Walid went out into the corridor. ‘Find out if he has a fever, get him to drink some water, and tell him if he won’t let you drive him I will not hesitate to drag him over here personally.’

Bev raised an eyebrow at me when I put the phone down.

 ‘I’m taking him to UCH,’ I told her.

The eyebrow went up another couple degrees. ‘Would you like any help with that?’

And for a solid ten seconds, I thought about saying yes, because unfortunately I knew my boss too well to think this wasn’t going to end in the closest approximation to a shouting match Nightingale would condescend to stoop to. ‘Nah,’ I said with as much chipper optimism as I could scrounge together. ‘I’ll manage.’

 

#

 

 ‘This is utterly ridiculous.’

 ‘Look, boss,’ I said, trying to sound reasonable, ‘if you’re so sure it’s nothing, surely the easiest course of action would be to let yourself be checked out and sent home with a round of aspirin, no harm done, and we can all move on and pretend this never happened.’ I sure as hell would have liked for this not to be happening, period.

 ‘It is a waste of valuable time and completely unnecessary.’

My instinctive response would have been ‘you’re unnecessary’, which just goes to show that I’ve been spending way too much time with Bev’s younger sisters. I bit back that piece of brazen impertinence and pointed out that in fact, since the Folly’s budget provided quite a tasty research grant for our favourite cryptopathologists, it wasn’t a waste of time as much as making sure we got our money’s worth.

Nightingale didn’t respond to that, because he was too busy trying to not sound like an extra in a documentary about the Black Death. I pushed another glass of water across the coffee table. ‘I can walk unassisted and I am not bleeding, so there is absolutely no cause for concern.’

 ‘That,’ I said flatly, ‘is possibly the least intelligent thing I have ever heard you say.’

He bristled a bit, and muttered something about ‘back in my day’ and ‘insubordination’ that I decided to ignore.

 ‘It’ll only get worse the more you resist,’ I pointed out, and realised with a slight shock that I had, in the tradition of expecting parents everywhere, started to sound quite a lot like my mother.

Not that we’d told anybody yet. The way our families worked, the moment we even mentioned the possibility that we might hypothetically not be opposed to having kids the entirety of London and a decent proportion of Sierra Leone would know, and the longer we could delay the inevitable onslaught of well-meaning nosey relatives, the better. So naturally, word would be out before the end of the month.

 ‘I want to make it quite clear,’ Nightingale said when he had recovered some of his usual posh composure, ‘that I protest this course of events.’

 ‘Protest all you like,’ I said, ‘as long as you get in the car.’

He didn’t say a word to me on the drive over, which was a tad childish. He’d folded into the car much the same way he’d sagged on the sofa earlier, like a marionette with its strings cut. I tried to drive carefully so the ride wouldn’t jostle him around too much but I don’t think it made much difference - by the time I’d parked the car, he’d gone even paler and there were beads of sweat on his forehead. _Definitely feverish_ , I thought.

I hesitated before I got out. ‘Are you sure you can make it upstairs?’

The look he gave me could have cut glass, so I didn’t say anything when he had to stop to catch his breath while he fought another hacking cough. I’d texted Dr Walid to let him know we were on our way so he met us at reception and somehow managed to bully Nightingale into a wheelchair.

 ‘Abdul, I -’

Dr Walid interrupted him: ‘Thomas, I was going to do you a favour and wait until Peter was out of earshot but if you had rather hear my professional opinion on your behaviour right here in the lobby, I am more than happy to give it to you -’

I know an escape route when I see it, so I ducked my head and left them to it. I went to find Abigail down in Dr Vaughan’s office, where she was doing homework and waiting for her MRI results.

She glared at me suspiciously. ‘You’re not due till next week.’

I told her why I was there, and when I saw her face fall I added: ‘I’m sure he’ll be fine; he’s survived worse.’

Abigail nodded. Her jaw was clenched and she had that defiant look in her eye that tells anybody who pays even the smallest bit of attention that although she may be but little, she is not to be fucked with. ‘He better be fine. Your Greek is atrocious.’

 ‘Oi,’ I said. ‘Unfair.’

We bickered back and forth for a bit, but our hearts weren’t in it and we both knew it. Dr Vaughan came in to tell Abigail that her brain was good as new and that she’d drive her home if she was okay to wait half an hour.

 ‘Yeah, sure,’ Abigail said, but I knew that there was a kebab in it for her because Dr Vaughan, for all her lectures on the importance of healthy living, was a bit of a hypocrite and took every opportunity to have Abigail as an excuse.

Dr Walid called me back upstairs less than twenty minutes later. ‘Chest infection,’ he declared, glaring pointedly at Nightingale, who definitely looked sheepish. ‘I’m keeping him here overnight so we can keep an eye on things and be sure he doesn’t make it worse than it already is.’

 I expected Nightingale to protest but evidently the lecture had had the desired effect. By some unfair agreement DCIs were spared the undignified hospital gowns, so he was still wearing his shirt and trousers, but, I noticed, no shoes. And fuck me, he still looked like shit. It’s not like I’ve never seen him when he’s sick but something about this felt different, more urgent somehow.

 ‘It’s been a busy week,’ he’d said back at the house, and he couldn’t tell me what had happened, but with me suspended and him in the hospital, the SAU might as well not exist for all the good it could do right now.

 ‘Who do I call?’ I asked Nightingale, who blinked at me. ‘To tell them you’re out,’ I clarified, already reaching for my phone. ‘What’s the contingency plan here?’

But of course there wasn’t a proper contingency plan, because when I was working on the by now massive Word Document I couldn’t think of anything that would actually work and in any case I never got around to finishing it before Lesley… before I got suspended.

Nightingale gestured in my direction. ‘As I have been trying to tell you, Abdul,’ he said, hoarsely. ‘I can’t afford to take time off.’

Dr Walid turned one of his glares on me and I ducked my head. ‘If you’d come in a week ago, _Thomas_ , you wouldn’t have had to.’

I raised both hands, palm outward, in the universal coppers’ gesture of ‘alright, everybody step away from the blunt objects’ and took a step back. ‘I’ll just… call Inspector Seawoll and let him know, okay? And I’ll drop by the Folly and get Molly to pack a bag. I’ll be back later.’ And then I fled because despite what some people may say, I prefer not to stick around active volcanoes unless absolutely necessary.

Seawoll swore up a right storm when I called him, but none of it was really directed at me, which was nice. ‘Why the fuck are you the one calling it in, anyway?’ he asked, and I was a bit stumped.

 ‘He was over at ours on Folly business, sir,’ I said. ‘You know. Training.’

 ‘Hmph,’ was the extent of Seawoll’s response. ‘Well, if the fucking city blows up while he’s in hospital at least those bastards at the IPCC might realise that keeping you on the bench is no fucking use to anyone whatsoever.’

Which was a rather more positive view of the situation than I had expected, especially since, if London did blow up while Nightingale was out sick, there was going to be a whole lot of other problems more important than a lowly DC’s suspension hearings.

It wasn’t like there was anything I could actually do, though, so Seawoll told me to take it easy (whatever the hell that was supposed to mean) and went off to shout at somebody else until they figured out what to do. I left the Ford at the hospital and walked over to Russell Square, where Molly met me at the back door with the overnight bag I’d texted her to pack.

 ‘He’ll be well grumpy when he gets back,’ I warned her.

Molly shrugged. If anybody could handle grumpy Nightingale, she was it. Besides, he wouldn’t dare be rude to Molly. That was a mistake you made exactly once. She handed me the bag, frowned at me, and gestured for me to wait. She came back a few minutes later with an actual picnic basket that looked like it was at least eighty years old, but the boxes inside were genuine Tupperware and she’d marked all of them with ’TN’s or ’PG’s in her neat copperplate. My mother had finally gotten to her with her distrust of hospital food, and she’d been sending samples of her latest culinary experiments over the river with Nightingale, so I probably should have seen this coming.

 ‘You really don’t have to,’ I said. ‘Bev and I can cook, you know.’

Molly shook her head at me disapprovingly and reached out to poke at my chest and adjust my jacket, which was a bit too big on me these days.

 ‘Yeah, yeah,’ I said. ‘Not you too.’

She shut the door in my face, and I trudged back to UCH. It had started to drizzle a bit, and the combined weight of the bag and the food made me wish I’d taken the car after all, never mind that it would have taken longer to find parking than it did to walk.

Nightingale was asleep in his hospital bed when I got there, so I dropped off his stuff and stacked his share of the Tupperware on the bedside table. They must have hit him up with all sorts of fun medication because he was breathing a lot better than he had been on Bev’s sofa and he looked almost as if he _wouldn’t_ fall over in a stiff breeze.

I would have just gone home - the fact that my teacher was out cold with a chest infection made me feel weirdly guilty about not completing my practice session - but Dr Walid’s spidey sense must have gone off when I’d entered the building and he herded me into his office before I could get a word in edgewise.

 ‘How are you doing?’ he asked, leaning forward with his elbows on his desk. ‘Thomas tells me you are keeping up with your training.’

I shrugged. ‘Don’t have much else to do, do I?’

Dr Walid raised an eyebrow like he wanted to disagree with me, but couldn’t think of a good argument. ‘Fair enough,’ he said, ‘I suppose.’

 ‘Look, it’s a shit situation, right? I mean, this is objectively not great. I sure wish I could do something more useful about it than go back home and wait for some bloke at the IPCC to decide whether they should throw me out now or in five months, but I can’t, so I’m just… going to do that.’

With a sigh, he leaned back in his creaky chair. ‘If it’s any consolation, I fully expect Thomas to be up and about again before the week is out.’

It didn’t really help, but I suppose it was better than nothing. I listened dutifully to the usual admonitions about my weight and drove home to my girlfriend, who had taken the opportunity to unlawfully claim more than half of the box of pastries she’d brought back and complained about me smelling like hospital, for which I compensated by handing her the basket with Molly’s cooking and offering to take her along when I drove the Jag back to the Folly tomorrow.

 ‘I knew there were perks to keeping you around,’ she said, reaching up to kiss me.

I don’t know what plan Seawoll came up with in the end, but the city didn’t blow up that night or the next and when Abigail came over to study on Sunday morning, she said Molly had glared at Nightingale until he submitted to bedrest and homemade concoctions of lemon and honey. ‘And he’s only complained about meddling apprentices twice in my hearing,’ she said, ‘so I think you’re safe for now.’

In fact, neither of us said anything about it at all. He Skyped me from the Mundane Library to go over my Latin homework and bury me under a fresh load of Greek, and although he still cleared his throat more than usual he seemed to have gotten over the worst of it remarkably well.

 ‘Dr Walid asked me to remind you that he is expecting you on Wednesday,’ he said before he hung up. ‘And Molly wants her Tupperware back.’

And thus, the world kept turning.

**Author's Note:**

> I promise I meant for this to be more lighthearted than it ended up. Whoops.


End file.
